RegeRa

A significant number of companies are wholly or partly state-owned in the Nordic countries, and therefore, state ownership plays an important role in society. State-owned companies are managed through ownership policies and government steering. However, during the past years, there has been a lot of criticism, both against the actions of responsible ministers and against the actions of state-owned companies. This has highlighted the need for states to legitimize their ownership and ways of managing it for citizens.

The aim of the RegeRa project is to find out how state ownership has been reported on and justified in Sweden and Finland in 2007–2018. The project seeks to illustrate what kind of image of state ownership has been conveyed to the Parliament and the citizens during this time period. The data of the study consists of the independent annual reports of government ownership steering 2007-2018 and interviews with the authors of the annual reports. The methods used in the project are based on genre analysis and discourse analysis.